Cloud universes will be pulled together in 2015

1) Gravitational forces pull cloud universes together: As clouds coalesce around sales, HR, finance and enterprise services, we’re seeing how these universes are naturally attracting one another. End users are demanding the expansive functionality that cloud integration provides, whilst cloud vendors can build the requisite connections to draw themselves closer together. Specifically common programming languages, such as Java, Javascript or Perl, provide each universe with a widening and more accessible surface area to connect.

2) A meteoric rise for cloud verticalisation: As cloud platforms continue to mature, it is spurring interest from industries that have been previously hesitant. Think of those most beset with regulation, compliance and privacy: government, life sciences, financial and healthcare. To help accelerate adoption within these industries, lots of cloud providers are also going to take steps to receive appropriate industry certifications, creating more platforms designed to align to European Data Protection Regulations, Sarbanes–Oxley (in the US), the Data Protection Act or Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations.

3) Increasingly, the CIO is buying services, not computer power: IT teams are looking through the lens of the business services they deliver, not the IT components. In the future, we’ll see enterprise IT teams thinking of, and buying services, to deploy apps or solve business problems like adding request management, onboarding employees or purchasing. This has several implications. One is the role of the CIO, which is moving away from being associated with broken smartphones, PCs and other hardware. Instead CIOs are focused on advising how to use IT to deliver the requisite business services. With that, CIOs are re-claiming their seat at the boardroom table with other business leaders. As a corollary, IT staff will need to develop new skills to be conversant and support business services.

4) Data-as-a-Service or Business Intelligence 2.0 emerges: As more companies build cloud-based systems-of-record that capture their corporate operational data, the data residing there is increasingly ripe for business intelligence. More enterprises will tap this data as a repository rich for operational insight. How are users accessing the company’s business services? What services are the most used? Having a single system of record can help IT teams leapfrog more traditional data warehousing techniques by running analytics on the data available in the system of record.

5) The cloud platform brings an “agile development” process to business teams: Just as agile development has changed the way software is coded, we’re seeing that cloud platforms are expediting the way business teams can convert ideas into applications. By having a common platform to develop on, organisations can let their teams rapidly create and test their ideas—in days or weeks instead of months. They can fail quickly – investing and risking less money. Think of the cloud platform as enabling the “Series A” investor within the enterprise. The cloud platform is unleashing a new era of B2B innovation."